Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China

A growing body of research suggests that authoritarian regimes are responsive to societal actors, but our understanding of the sources of authoritarian responsiveness remains limited because of the challenges of measurement and causal identification. By conducting an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties, we examine factors that affect officials' incentives to respond to citizens in an authoritarian context. At baseline, we find that approximately one‐third of county governments respond to citizen demands expressed online. Threats of collective action and threats of tattling to upper levels of government cause county governments to be considerably more responsive, whereas identifying as loyal, long‐standing members of the Chinese Communist Party does not increase responsiveness. Moreover, we find that threats of collective action make local officials more publicly responsive. Together, these results demonstrate that top‐down mechanisms of oversight as well as bottom‐up societal pressures are possible sources of authoritarian responsiveness.     

Resistance to Position Change,Motivated Reasoning,and Polarization

Political Behavior - People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms...     

Mary E. Gallagher: Authoritarian Legality in China: Law,Workers, and the State

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Engaging Frontline Workers in Times of Organizational Change

In "Beyond Cognition: Affective Leadership and Emotional Labor," Professors Newman, Guy, and Mastracci further the discussion of contemporary leadership by exploring leadership transitions in public agencies that serve vulnerable populations, such as the abused elder, the neglected child, or the court-involved teenager.     

The Public Service: Independence, Responsibility and Responsiveness

In recent years there has been controversy surrounding the issues of the independence, responsibility and responsiveness of our public services. Critics come from two opposing directions: (i) there have been charges of politicisation of the public service, with the implication that it has lost its independence and become dominated by the government; (ii) Pusey (1991) has accused 'economic rationalists' in the public service of pursuing their own neo-classical agenda and dominating government policy. Both criticisms reveal a misunderstanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of ministers and public servants and the proper relations between them. In our system of democratic government, it is the prerogative of ministers to decide and the role of departments to propose and advise and then implement the decisions of ministers. This contribution begins by considering the respective responsibilities of ministers and officials, before canvassing the charges of politicisation and what should be expected from public servants in contributing to policy development. Finally there is consideration of the ethical values of public servants and what responsibility they might have for the 'public interest'.     

Manfred Frank,Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,and Jean-Luc Nancy: Prolegomena to a French-German Dialogue

Abstract

This essay works to set up a debate between the German philosopher Manfred Frank and the French philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. At stake in the debate is the concept of freedom. The essay begins by explaining Frank's subject-based concept of freedom and then it presents the perfectly opposed non-subjective ontological concept of freedom that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy forward. In the end, in the interest of threading a way through this impasse, and following the cue of these three philosophers, we turn to the early German Romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel to help us reconceptualise freedom. Following their cue, I draw on the strengths of Frank and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy while avoiding their dangerous extremes.     

Cultivating Clients: Reputation,Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums

Studies of clientelism overwhelmingly focus on how brokers target voters with top-down benefits during elections. Yet brokers also receive requests from voters for assistance between elections, initiating the processes through which they cultivate clients. Why are brokers responsive to the requests of some voters and not others? We provide the first study of broker preferences when evaluating client appeals. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote monitors anticipate they will prefer co-partisans and coethnics, whose reciprocity they can best verify. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote mobilizers anticipate they will prefer residents who will maximize their reputations for efficacy. We test these expectations through a conjoint experiment with 629 Indian slum leaders, ethnographic fieldwork, and a survey of 2,199 slum residents. We find evidence of reputational considerations shaping broker responsiveness. We find mixed support for monitoring concerns, highlighted by an absence of the strong ethnic favoritism assumed to dominate distributive politics in many developing countries.     

Social Citizenship in China: Continuity and Change

A fundamental feature of Chinese social citizenship is the demarcation between the rural population and the urban population. Entitlement to income security and welfare provision has been exclusively a right of city dwellers. However, as economic reform progresses, the socialist welfare system has become unable to provide adequate protection. Welfare reform intends to widen the social security net, yet it has inadvertently exacerbated social inequality. In the meantime, the inferior social position of the peasantry has worsened as an effect of continued state bias, heightened tax and fee burdens, and the expropriation of farmland for development. In light of the intrusion on their rights and interests, more and more Chinese citizens have taken to protesting to voice their discontent.     

Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines,Delay, and Responsiveness

Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique rules with statutory deadlines published in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions between 1995 and 2012. The argument and findings about the timing and ultimate promulgation of rules have implications that reorient the study of the regulatory agenda from legal and political into more managerial terms.     

Electoral Competition, Participation, and Government Responsiveness in Mexico

In this article I test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy posit that elected governments are responsive to public demands because citizens are able to sanction bad politicians and select good ones. Participatory theories attribute responsiveness to a citizenry's ability to articulate demands and pressure government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two approaches, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, and public-financial indicators for Mexico's 2,400 municipalities, from 1989 to 2000. The data show that electoral competition has no effect on municipal government performance. But the results are consistent with the hypothesis that nonelectoral participation causes improved performance. Thus, I suggest that the quality of municipal government in Mexico depends on an engaged citizenry and cooperation between political leaders and their constituents, rather than the threat of electoral punishment. I recommend that scholars broaden the study of government responsiveness to account for participatory strategies of political influence and critically assess the claims of those who would promote elections as a cure-all for poor democratic performance.     

Repression,spontaneity, and collective action: the 2013 Turkish Gezi protests

Scholars have identified various conditions that influence the formation of spontaneous collective action. Certain types of opposition strategies and geographic conditions make it likelier for protesters to be able to overcome reactive repression and keep mobilizing after experiencing state violence. As such, it is still unclear why a small protest sometimes diffuses into an unforeseen mass wave of dissent. Through examination of Turkish civil society, this study introduces a framework to explain the emergence of the 2013 Gezi protest, which was the largest in the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) government-led era of Turkish politics. A sequence of mechanisms including viral diffusion, elite updating/cover-up, public outrage, and coordination are categorized and linked to previously identified antecedent conditions as well as Twitter activity of social movement organizations which took part in the protests. The framework advances our knowledge of repression backfire by identifying its causal mechanisms and classifying a configuration of conditions under which the phenomenon is likely to empirically take place.     

Governing Climate Change in China and Brazil: Mitigation Strategies

This article analyzes governmental responses for the climate change challenge in China and Brazil. Both countries have a central role in the climate change debate since they are major greenhouse gases emitters, thus contributing to the aggravation of the problem, each with differentiated participation. At the same time, policy measures aimed at climate issues in these countries may lead to the reconfiguration of international negotiations on the topic. The methodological aspects include three main points of analysis: the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions in both countries; political and institutional structures mobilized to the climate issue and focusing on mitigation and policy responses related to climate change.     

Introduction: Issue Congruence and Political Responsiveness

It has long been realised that democratic governance requires a two-way flow of influence. Governments must be able to respond to what people want and people must be able to react to what governments do. These preconditions for democratic governance have been central to two research traditions on political representation. One of these, the responsible party approach, views policy change as a consequence of ‘electoral turnover’, while the other, the dynamic representation approach, focuses on policy change that occurs in ‘rational anticipation’ of electoral repercussions. The aim of this volume is to evaluate the state of political representation in contemporary Europe and to advance our understanding of the topic by presenting fresh insights both on the extent to which there exists issue congruence between voters and parties and the degree to which there is dynamic representation in the policy responses of representatives. This introduction describes in some detail the nature of the two approaches and then briefly summarises the contributions made in the remainder of the volume.     

Responsive Authoritarianism in China -- a Review of Responsiveness in Xi and Hu Administrations

Journal of Chinese Political Science - Xi Jinping’s efforts to recentralize political power have triggered a debate over if these changes will destroy the “authoritarian...